We learned back in July that Assassin’s Creed Syndicate will see a return of the multi-kill finishers from Assassin’s Creed III. Ubisoft has now explained that multi-kill finishers and concealed weapons are part of the game’s relatively modern setting compared to its predecessors. In an interview, Senior Producer François Pelland said:

One thing that we realized right at the start was that we’re past the medieval period, so there could be no more swords. We’ve moved into an age where if there was any kind of brawl on the streets, it was making the headlines. So that’s certainly very different from what we saw only 75 years before this period, with the French Revolution. So we wanted to give the combat a more brutal and visceral feel to it, hence the emphasis on concealed weapons. To that end, one of the changes we’ve made to combat is that we’re bringing back the multi-kill multi-finisher from Assassin’s Creed III.

We’re told that the introduction of two main characters in the game (twins Jacob and Evie) has to do with modernization as well.

I remember two years ago we started to think about how we could tell a modern story in a modern era, and we decided at that point to tell the story of a pair of twins with very different personalities

Pellend also said that players will be able to climb on top of trains, “unhinge wagons,” and go “all across the city” using them as a fast-travel tool.